System for taking and organising reading notes

Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 6, 2011 at 01:43 PM

Pavi wrote:
>@MontrealFan: why are you doing everything through Zotero, instead of
>using UltraRecall (or similar) and then leveraging the capabilities of Zotero
>through UR?
> >@Lucas: if you use Zotero, again UltraRecall is an ideal platform for
>outlining, since Zotero references can be integrated into Word embedded files
>inside UR. TreeProjects can probably also do this quite well, although I have not
>investigated if export of multiple documents to a merged document is
>possible.
> >@Dr Andus: I forgot another main
>reason that I think UltraRecall is idea for your setup: they are planning to integrate
>a Python API, which means that datamining of your database should soon become
>possible. As an academic, I am actually planning to write some code to do this as soon as
>they release (stated to be early 2012). Right now, I have templates
>(forms/attributes) holding the key information I plan to data mine later, so that I
>can add this capability to exisiting information. Now it is possible to export the
>data by “Copy grid values”, but I prefer the integrated approach.
> >Best, /Pavi

Thanks Pavi, I will take another look at your original UR/Zotero post. Actually one reason why I never got into UR is because I discovered NVivo and that turned out to be a very powerful way of bringing all my research data together and analysing it. So I think NVivo is also a worthy contender for the second stage of analysing and organising reading notes (@MontrealFan).

The problem with NVivo is that it is very expensive. Also, it is a resource-hog, similarly to Dragon, and quite slow. But the analytical capabilities are superb and apparently v. 9 (which I don’t have) can handle PDFs and link with EndNote. Also, NVivo have some fabulous tutorial videos, so one can learn it in a day or two, while I admit that I still haven’t got my head around UR completely.

So it sounds like to get a handle on dealing with reading notes for a huge project, at the moment one needs a cross-platform solution for capturing notes (e.g. Evernote) + a powerful database and analytical software (UR, Nvivo, MyInfo) + a reference manager (Zotero, EndNote).